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Tower District
The Slums, officially known as the Tower District, is home to a large number of dispossessed and poverty-stricken individuals in the shadow of the Diamond Spire, a haunting, self-contained structure rising nearly 1,800 feet from the surrounding wasteland. Its Sordid History Originally planned in the mid-1960s to be a self-sufficient, world-class habitat with state-of-the-art facilities where the best and brightest examples of humanity could live and work together, free of the chaos afflicting the rest of the world. Well aware of the practical limits of actually finishing the project and social tensions alike, the architects deliberately planned construction to be a top-down affair, completing the core habitat almost before the support structure, and obscured the identities of all but the most famous of those destined to occupy the arcology. Naturally, there was interference. No less than three major supernaturally-inclined organisations, six 'mundane' individuals with significant clout in government and finance, and a host of lesser politicians, activists, radicals and scientists opposed to the idea strove to control, undermine, destroy, or at least hinder the Diamond Spire's completion. Technically, they succeeded. At the close of the 1970s, the computer administrating the arcology sealed off the habitat completely and broadcast a warning to all that full lockdown was in effect, an unknown, extremely virulent disease running rampant among the people inside. Any trying to leave or enter would be destroyed. The City of Paradigm affected a further quarantine zone around the structure, all but abandoning the lower-class workers tasked with assembling the behemoth tower. Its Residents A small team of CDC specialists was sent to establish a base of operations to monitor the situation and distribute meagre supplies to the lost souls now trapped in what became known as the Slums, who scrape by and live in fear of many things—the petty, autocratic pseudo-governance of the corrupt CDC team, the shadow of the unknown disease high above, internal strife between myriad small gangs vying for power...and a sense of dread haunts their every waking moment. The work gangs in the skeletal scaffolding between the desert floor and the cloud city quickly became brutish, anarchic groups, even to the point of manifesting feral attributes. There is no question but that some paranormal agent consumed their humanity and now dwells as a malevolence seething among the girders of the spire, hosted by the near-mindless former workers. When the Cloud City computer sealed off the habitat, it had a number of very good reasons for doing so. Some were suggestions of external threats implanted in its code both by those seeking to destroy it and its primary architects, who were aware of a bit more than they should have been. Others were derived from the vast amounts of data streaming in from sensors all over the structure, which individually meant little, but when seen as the larger picture they inevitably formed, revealed enough of a glimpse of the Real World to engage every protection routine the computer had available, and a few it had to invent itself. Finally, the reason broadcast to the world for the lockdown, the purported disease; a naturally-occurring event, to be sure, but the virus itself imbues no less than supernatural abilities on those infected. While occasional mutant-types and aberrant human specimens had been recorded throughout history, this new disease represented a potential explosion of metahumans that, unchecked, would turn civilisation on its head, with a very high likelihood of utter destruction. And so the computer made its choice, and has for the past three and a half decades been carefully monitoring and tending its flock. The Cloud City computer is just a computer, though. And a fairly old one, now. Its sensor array doesn't see everything. There are entities with keen interest in the petri dish the arcology has become. Including entities that would stir the pot to their own ends. One of the most sinister of these is the vanguard of a vast horde of interdimensional beings fleeing the nova of their home star. This being, this scout, is only in the faintest shadow of existence in our world, but voraciously consumes and thrives both on the very energies that give metahumans their abilities, and the despair of the Slum-dwellers. It has been fostering depression among the ordinary humans, and when it perceives a certain potential, triggers in them a change that ignites latent superpowers. The CDC team has been instructed to hunt down and capture these when they appear in the slums (as that is, of course, the sole symptom of the Diamond Spire's disease) and keep them in secure storage until they can be processed. Unknown to the CDC, that processing involves being transported up to the Cloud City's energy research project, which harvests the paranormal energies. Unknown the the researchers, almost all of that paranormal energy is consumed by the alien, rather than distributed as intended. And the shining key to it all...is the one who first succumbed to the effects of the virus, unwittingly contacted and invited the scout to Earth, moved by its tragic tale of a lost home but unaware of the dire implications and methods of it and its kin, and now provides the very conduit by which the alien is able to manifest itself in our world. Her name is Emelina Mañerez-Izquierdo. She fights the darkness that works to consume the Slums, wholly ignorant that it is the poor lost soul to whom she offered refuge that is its cause, and almost as ignorant of the swelling darkness that rushes to consume the globe. She can't help but have a sense of deep dread, though. They are coming...and one day they will arrive. Whether there is an open door for them or not remains to be seen.